Camp Morris Jesup
Courtesy of F. A. Stokes Company
Though Eskimos deserted and turned back, Peary still pushed on, at last left with only the two companions, some forty dogs and three sledges. The prospect was indeed dismal. Lee became disabled by frost-bites; the dogs died; the gaunt form of starvation loomed on the horizon. May 8, Lee could proceed no farther, and was left in camp, distant some sixteen miles from the coast, while Peary and Henson advanced in the desperate search for game. Four days and nights death by starvation faced them, in the fruitless search for food. Then, disappointed, back to camp, and a desperate march to Independence Bay. Then down the tortuous valley, across rocks, cobble, and boulder, the men plunged on. “A few miles beyond the valley, I saw a fresh hare track,” says Peary, “and a few hundred yards beyond came upon the hare itself, squatting among the rocks a few paces distant. With the sight of the beautiful spotless little animal, the feeling of emptiness in the region of my stomach increased. I called to Matt, who was some little distance back, to stop the dogs and come up with his rifle. He was so affected by the prospect of a good supper, his first and second bullets missed the mark, but at the third the white object collapsed into a shapeless mass, and on the instant gaunt hunger leapt upon us like a wolf upon its prey.... It was the first full meal we had had since the Eskimos left us thirty-five days ago.”
Later musk-ox fell to the hunter’s aim, which restored courage and strength to the desperate men. They reached the cairn which Peary had erected in 1892, and found the papers there still intact. To linger in the vicinity meant a constant consumption of food for which they were not prepared. There was yet the long journey back over the dread ice-cap, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. With nine dogs, and food for seventeen days only, they retraced their steps, fleeing in forced marches, from that ever present gaunt form, Starvation, closing upon their wake.
One by one the faithful dogs died by the wayside. This retreat over the Great Ice is one of the most desperate struggles in Arctic history. At last, June 25, the three starving, exhausted men reached Bowdoin Bay. “At the beginning of the last day there were left four biscuits, saved from the half and quarter rations of the preceding weeks; and one dog was still alive, the sole survivor of a pack of forty-two.”
“Poor brute!” says Peary, “the memory of those famine days upon the ‘Great Ice’ remained so vividly with him, that for weeks after our return, though weak and afflicted like ourselves, he might be seen at any time, when not asleep, hiding away every bit of meat or blubber, and every bone that he could find about the place.”
A few weeks of recuperation fitted the men for the journey home, and relief ship Kite, in charge of Captain Bartlett, reached them in early August.
SUMMER VOYAGES, 1896-1897
In 1896 and 1897, Peary made two summer voyages to the Arctic for the purpose of transferring to the United States the largest of the three Cape York meteorites. On the first trip he was successful in dislodging this ninety-ton mass from the ice grip of centuries, but was compelled to leave it until the next season, when he successfully had it transferred to the hold of the Hope, the Peary ship of that year, and the world wonder now reposes in the Museum of Natural History, New York City.